July 1, 1999

Soultech

The productive apparatus in all its aspects turned back onto the individual in all its aspects. Soultech is more than ideology, propaganda, psychoanalysis, etc. If it is anything, postmodernism—in the United States in particular—is, aside from its “cultural” accoutrements, the exportation of production combined with the evolution and wider application of methods of personality production. A regime of remote control as opposed to discipline, a regime of omnipresent Popperian cues, messages, and instructions -- positive-response coefficient  heightened by the removal of the primary barrier: self-understanding, i.e., class consciousness, i.e., that which used to give the US working class an obvious clue as to its power: confrontation with the material object of labor + work + finished product = potential class consciousness in just one step. The discovery made by Hegel and refined by Marx and Kojève, that labor is negation, is covered over, mystified, dissolved in the tertiary sector, which only manages what is produced elsewhere. The exploitative relationship at the heart of contemporary society is still experienced, though more abstractly: the media steps into this space with the images of the Market, of Success, of Joy, of Capitalism, preventing even practically anticapitalist proletarians from becoming conscious anticapitalists. The virtualization of the economy in the United States, i.e., the exportation of production for speculation and other forms of fictitious-capital circulation, in response to class struggles, still requires a soultech infrastructure. The infrastructure is not only the remains, the rotting husk, of the public education system—which is the single most outstanding example of personality production and which must be distinguished from soultech; like capitalism preserves peasant agriculture, the public education system is a component of soultech—, the remaining industrial outfits, the highway system and public transportation, most especially the urban grid and architecture—it is also, perhaps more crucially, the human personality, the human soul, which must be patterned after certain profit-optimal templates, must be encouraged to grow itself into them. Must congeal into a personality, a character-type, by a certain age. Consumption must be predictable, and easily charted and mapped, preferably along the profit-optimal lines of the street grids. We are dealing with an incredible leap forward in what was formerly called ideology. A dialectical conversion of quantity of manipulation methods into quality of possible human experience. See the movie The Game, directed by David Fincher, starring Michael Douglas.

soultech movies ideology spectacle